Govt trampled on informal sector during lockdown, Covid-19 report finds
Updated | By Cliff Shiko
The Department of Planning, Monitoring & Evaluation has released a report that highlights the impact of Covid-19 hard lockdown on various sectors in the country.
The report, which was released on Thursday, indicates that the informal sector was heavily impacted during the lockdown.
The reasons include the restrictions on trading hours for the liquor industry, restaurants, and other small businesses.
"The realities of the informal sector, government need to understand this informal sector better, because the way they impacted on certain communities is very directly that people could not get food, they had to travel to nearby shopping malls to buy food and that required them to pay for transport," said Godfrey Mashamba, who is the Deputy Director-General in the department.
"There were some sectors exposed to the implications of the lockdown such as tourism sector, because where there is no movement tourism you have to travel for leisure or restaurants those sectors were affected very badly."
The report also found that civil society played an important role during the hard lockdown because of their proximity to the communities they operate.
"Some of them had to abandon their routine programs in favour of short-term interventions to address the crisis, drawing from limited resources they had to divert their resources to fight Covid-19 impact and the funding sources were getting more drier," Mashamba said.
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